Bachmann: Off and running?

The presidential campaign of Tea Party champion Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is percolating: CNN reports Bachmann has signed up an Iowa coordinator and will field an exploratory committee later this spring.

Bachmann will be the second GOP White House hopeful from Minnesota, a state that was once home to such Democratic presidential candidates as Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced his exploratory committee earlier this week.

Bachmann has shown a not-always-solid command of the history of the country she would lead.

On a recent visit to New Hampshire, she said that the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord took place in the Granite State: They were fought in Massachusetts.

In Iowa, she intoned: “But we also know that the very Founders that wrote these documents (Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution) worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Several of the Founders, including great presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners.

Bachmann has been a trenchant critic of the Obama administration and even her colleagues, once asking. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?”

Bachmann has been a kind of Rachel Carson-in-reverse on environment and energy issues. She has decried “the global warming hoax,” and opined: “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back,” Bachmann told a Tea Party rally in her home state.

Bachmann was organizer of the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives. She is serving her third term in Congress.